Via Andrew Hearst’s ever-fulfilling Panopticist site, we have learned of a brilliant, gratifyingly out-there rockumentary parody that actually has an actor playing Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (!!!), who is an entry on page 9 of our book. Entitled Yacht Rock and featured on the Channel 101 site, a Web-based de facto guerilla TV network that runs small-time filmmakers’ shorts, the parody purports to tell the story of how Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins came to write the Doobie Brothers hit “What a Fool Believes.” (The actors playing McDonald and Loggins seem to have real beards, but otherwise the production values are early Dr. Who-level.) If you’re a Rock Snob, make a point of watching this right away–it’s wonderfully barmy in the tradition of peak-period Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas on SCTV.

With the U.K. publication of The Rock Snob*s Dictionary has come our first pissy writeup by a self-hating British Rock Snob! For good measure, this fellow, from the Independent, condemns our employer, Vanity Fair, as a “celebrity puff sheet” with a “grimly flip style.” (The nonsensical juxtaposition of “grimly” and “flip” aptly encapsulates his equivocating I-love-this/I-hate-this stance.) And yet a search of articles by this vexed little turnip reveals that he has used the term “rock snob” in his writings six times since we first started doing the dictionary feature in Vanity Fair in 2000, and his usage isn’t some example of a midlantic convergence of like minds, but a clear lift from us, e.g., from an article he wrote on November 17, 2000, just days after our first installment of the dictionary was published, “The film-star handsome 20-year-old is extraordinarily talented, hitting all the Rock Snobs’ favourite reference points (Alex Chilton and Jeff Buckley, for instance) while retaining his individuality.” And onward he goes, right up thru 2004. That’s a lot of grim flipping through a celebrity puff sheet.

Finally, re: U2’s Live 8 performance with Macca [p. 65 in the book], Bono was moved to say before the show that Sgt. Pepper “was a SEMINAL Beatles album.” Snobbily done, Mr. Hewson!

Film Snobbery

Food Snobbery

Wine Snobbery

AIP. Commonly used shorthand for American International Pictures, a crank-’em-out production company, founded in 1954, that was among the first institutions to be exalted as a font of Important Kitsch; as far back as 1979, AIP was the subject of an adoring retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Unabashedly chasing the whims of fickle teens, AIP’s mandate switched from Westerns (ROGER CORMAN’s Apache Woman) to “teen horror” (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) to Vincent Price’s “Poe” movies (House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum) to the Annette-and-Frankie “Beach Party” movies—though, in later years, AIP’s output skewed ever more exploitatively toward Grindhouse fare (e.g., PAM GRIER in Black Mama, White Mama). Kutcher exudes the bland hunkiness of a juvenile lead in an old AIP feature.